The Holocaust Was Not Summer School; Slavery Was Not Trade School.

Someone -- I can't find who -- once said, in relation to claims that Jews had "failed to the learn the lessons of Auschwitz", that "the Holocaust was not summer school."

The retort there was in relation to claims that Jews had not imbibed the correct moral sentiments following our genocide. But I was reminded of it upon hearing the recent defenses of Florida's "anti-woke" efforts to whitewash slavery by lauding the "skills" slaves allegedly acquired -- apologias which, unsurprisingly, have spilled over to Holocaust minimization as well.

Fox News star Greg Gutfeld, whose latest book debuted on Tuesday, is currently under fire over his recent observation that Jewish people “had to be useful” in order to survive concentration camps, prompting the Auschwitz Museum to rebuke his comments as an “oversimplification” of the Holocaust. 

[....] 

During Monday’s broadcast of Fox News’ The Five, which both Watters and Gutfeld co-host, the panel raged against Vice President Kamala Harris’ condemnation of the Florida curriculum as racist. Watters, for instance, blasted the veep for not wanting “African-Americans and white Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved.”

The heated discussion, however, took an uncomfortable turn when lone liberal panelist Jessica Tarlov drew a parallel between slavery and the Holocaust, wondering if Florida schools would also teach that Jewish people received some benefits from the Nazis systematically murdering them in death camps.

Gutfeld, referencing a famous book by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, took Tarlov’s challenge and ran with it.

“Did you ever read Man’s Search for Meaning?” Gutfeld wondered. “Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility! Utility kept you alive!”

The slide from "anti-CRT" to Holocaust trivialization is nothing new, of course. And here in particular we have one of those moments where an ounce of truth helps generate a ton of falsehood. It is true that, comparatively speaking, a Jewish inmate who had skills that happened to be useful for the Nazi war effort (or otherwise coveted by the local commander) was more likely to survive. Likewise, it's true that having enough wealth to pay for bribes actuarially increased one's life span compared to the destitute. It is not true that "utility kept you alive" (a phrase that is eerily adaptive of arbeit macht frei). Plenty of people with "utility" were murdered by the Nazis. It is not true that having money insulated Jews from the Nazis. Plenty of Jews with means were nonetheless rounded up and slaughtered. The relationship of "utility" to the Jewish experience in the camps was not one of moxie and grit overcoming incredible odds; anymore than the relationship of wealth was one of frugality and financial stewardship steering one to safety. There is no favor done to the oppressed that they can sometimes leverage opportunities to resist.

But again, this is the inevitable byproduct of the anti-woke panic. The obsession with never speaking forthrightly and honestly about oppression and discrimination -- always viewing it as a "both sides" initiative -- means one has to find ways to render Nazism, if not benign, then at least filed down. Others have written about the gentile obsession with telling feel-good Holocaust stories where plucky protagonists show their wiles and skills to secure a happy ending. This is a myth that non-Jews need to tell themselves to evade reckoning with the Holocaust in its full horror; the Holocaust did not come with happy endings.

And the same is true of slavery. Slavery was not a somewhat-unsavorily-run trade school. It was a form of White supremacist oppression. Trying to find the "happy endings" is an attempt to avoid reckoning with its horrors. And the thing is, if we actually took seriously the "nobody should be made to feel guilty based on the color of their skin" pablum, there'd be no quarrel with teaching the history in its full terrible glory. Learning of the horrors of slavery doesn't and shouldn't make White people feel guilty. The guilt comes from learning those facts and then wanting to carry on as before -- no change in affect, no change in politics, as if it never happened. The dissonance between the historical knowledge and the desire to pretend as if the history didn't happen or didn't matter -- that's what creates the guilt. But that's guilt based on one's own choices, and history class needn't and shouldn't have an interest in absolving you of that.